Category: Safety & SAR

Cochise is certainly eye-catching, and especially so when you realize that you’re looking at the personal cruising “dream machine” of the relentless innovator Steve Dashew. So even though the navigation setup inside that huge combination flying bridge and pilot house was brand new state-of-the-art in 2016, it’s been so radically modified since then that I burst into uncontrollable giggling on first sight…

At the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show I got to take a demo cruise with SiOnyx to see their Aurora night vision camera in action. What I saw during our trip along the New River and Intracoastal Waterway was impressive, but also illustrated some limitations…

Blue Guard’s BG-One Oil and Fuel Detector with Smart Bilge Pump Switch won the IBEX innovation for electrical equipment. With this switch, Blue Guard seems to have thought through the problem of oil in the bilge and come up with a smart solution to ensure safety while minimizing the potential for environmental impact…

I often use and deeply appreciate the bundle of clever features that Vesper Marine calls SmartAIS, but darned if I didn’t miss one. While the WatchMate app screen above shows some aspects of the Vesper collision avoidance intelligence that makes this my favorite real-world AIS plotting tool (among many choices), it is actually a built-in simulation with significant benefits…

A timely first point I’d like to make is that this ClearCruise feature is not the same as the new ClearCruise Augmented Reality that Ben Stein just wrote about. While both features are exclusive to certain Raymarine MFDs, they work with different types of cameras in different ways. I think that both technologies are valuable and I strongly suspect that they will evolve together as Ray and Flir clearly blaze trail in advanced navigation imaging…

I spent the last four days judging the Innovation Awards and then attending IBEX, the International Boat Builders’ Exposition. We awarded Raymarine’s ClearCruise AR (augmented reality) technology (press release) the award for the OEM electronics category, and I have to say I’m pretty excited by this technology.

The United States Coast Guard (USCG) recently published an alert detailing the effect of Electro Magnetic Interference (EMI) caused by some LED products, and the potential for electronic communication interference. Simple testing can identify whether there’s a problem, but the situation can be avoided if owners choose products that are certified to international standards.

The USCG recently issued a Safety Alert about how LED lighting near VHF antennas can cause poor reception on attached radios, which of course includes AIS and DSC reception along with regular marine VHF audio channels. I’m surprised because I remember such problems coming up and being solved a decade ago, which was very early in the evolution of LED lighting…but…

Many readers got excited when Panbo covered the “coming soon” Standard Horizon GX6500 and GX6000 radios in October, 2016. It looked like SH was about to blaze trail once again, but then the story got confusing, even sad…But a real GX6000 along with the trailblazing RAM4W mic materialized at my door on Friday, and I’m tentatively impressed.